NEWS from one hundred years ago: INSIDIOUS CONSPIRACY

The government and the most conservative newspapers are campaigning against striking coalminers and other workers guilty of ‘disloyalty.’ The Poverty Bay Herald, for example, uses common phrases when it editorialises about the question today. ‘Looking back over the last few months there has been scarcely a week in which some new dislocation of industry has not occurred — watersiders, jockeys, firemen, sugar workers, tramwaymen, and colliers have all shared in the general provocation of disturbance.’ The disputes are being stirred up by extremists. ‘The extremists would divide the community into two classes: Labor and Capital; but where can they draw the line? There are thousands of people with small businesses who cannot be put into the capitalist class, and who are most severely hit on every occasion by the strike promoters. There are thousands of clerical workers who are equally suffering from the constant dislocation of industry.’ The nation as a whole sees ‘a conspiracy insidiously at work to promote trouble — forces of revolution and anarchy which if the extremists had their way, would land New Zealand in just such disastrous trouble as has occurred in Russia or Italy.’
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Poverty Bay Herald, 30 September 1920